We’re doting on dottiness in our dottiest edition ever: let’s have a look at dots!
The dot point version:
- jot some dots on measured slots;
- plot the lot from top spot to bott’;
- blot with a pot to hide what you’ve got.
One Thing To Rule Them All
The most important element we need is our alphabet! Decoding this message relies on lining up letters to the markings, whatever format they are in.
We need to mark out 26 sections to get little boxes to write your A-Z. The easiest way to make one is to get a standard 30cm ruler and mark out each 1cm interval, but scale this down if you need to, or just find some grid paper.
Then get marking! As an example, in your top row put a dot in line with ‘E’. Move your ruler down the page and put another dot at “S”. For this one let’s keep equal distances until you mark out ‘C’, ‘A’, ‘P’ and ‘E’ again.
We’ve got dots but how can we camouflage the word?
Show Me The Dots!
Connecting the dots helps disguise them by making them into a line graph. Give it a mundane title “Sales Figures for NW Tasmania 2016” and you’re all set to hide our message economically and let your recipient zig and zag their way down to decode it.
Shiny Dots In The Sky
Here our example shows the night sky referring to a Beatles song:
Dottin’ Around The Christmas Tree
Wish someone Feliz Navidot with Twelve Dots of Christmas:
X Marks The Dot
By having our dots represent points of interest, hiding them away in plain sites lets them hide away in plain sight.
Using this map of Australian cities also shows an example of working this code backwards: take markings that already exist and make them work for your code. The trick is to jumble up your ruler to fit the data (instead of a normal alphabetical order)
The AntiDot
To decipher, our puzzling pal needs to have a measuring device with the same markings in place. Putting this at the correct spot going across the page is the next important part, so consider letting your puzzling pal know what the first dot equates to. They can then line up the dot to that marking on their ruler and start decoding – once they find where you’ve hidden the dots that is.
Happy escaping!